Category Archives: No Place Like Home

Today is an unniversary of sorts for me. It was 3 years ago that I responded to being asked to move out of my house where I’d lived for 10 years with my son and my then-wife of 17 years. I moved in with my friend TJ for the next several months, at which point I began numbering my housing situations as if they were software revision numbers. Because of divorce math and the best interests of my son, I got to pay my own rent and also the full mortgage on the house for the next 20 months, after which the house was finally sold at a loss of 17 thousand US dollars.

So if you see me out this week and I seem conflicted, it’s because I am half-way celebrating and half-way pissy. I am ultimately very glad that the turn of events has helped me to see who I really am and what and whom I value in my life. I am thankful that my health and my mind are intact (to my knowledge, at least, though some of my friends may beg to differ on the latter) and that all of this change is leading me (sometimes painfully against my so-called will) to a more peaceful recognition of who I am inside and how I spend my time when I am all by my solo, but I am also occasionally very frustrated about the continued financial and psychical costs of this knowledge.

I’ve been working (not working, actually) on a longer post about the revision numbering of my dwellings and the craziness involved in leaving my most recent residence to move into the one I’ve had since May of this year, but it seems I’ve been more content lately to have new experiences than to write about past experiences. That is all.

being called Honky! by a passing ‘hoodmobile while out on an evening walk;

the arrival of a new air conditioner in my (most recent) apartment, and the rehabilitation of my shower into something that actually directs water onto the person standing within its confines;

my receipt(?) of an unplanned root canal, complete with same-day visits to a dentist and an oral surgeon, from whom I was given(?) a total of 34 injections to the gum in the almost-all-day attempt to do what started out months ago as a routine repair on an old filling;

being given a new and interesting task at work, where I am continually glad to remain employed;

the clarification of the preferred scope of a few interpersonal relationships that have been needing it; and

several instances of hockey-related and music-related socializing.

The rate of change in my life over the past few years has had me considering a lot of things over the past few weeks, mostly of the kind David Byrne and Thom Yorke have already covered much more succinctly than I could. In the past couple of years, almost all of the superficial (using this term in its neutral sense, not negatively) aspects of my life have changed significantly, and some of them repeatedly. Obviously, we are all going to be presented with changes of various sorts throughout our brief lives, and, after a decade spent with my nose to the grindstone trying to prevent change, it is probably my turn to be experiencing some of the ups and downs that I have. While part of me keeps hoping the pace will slow now that a few particular pages have been recently turned, I am trying to be careful to remain aware of and open to the changes going on around and within me — and to learn if I am doing things out of habit, and if being here now is where I am supposed to be now.

“Once in a lifetime./Same as it ever was.” “I’m a freak, I’m a weirdo; what the Hell am I doing here?” “Home is where I want to be, lift me up and turn me ’round.” Before any relative feels the need to step in, I don’t feel as if I am a freak or a weirdo any more so than anyone else is, they’re just songs.

And so daily lately I have received reminders that, unless some other kind of change requires it, I can’t see any reason to consider moving from Nashville any time soon. Why would I leave a place where one can be entertained by a band of top-notch Nashville musicians collectively known as The Spaghetti Westerneers playing for tips on a Sunday afternoon that’s too hot to permit outdoor enjoyment of any sort? I didn’t go, but it was only because I chose instead to finish the move-in, arranging furniture, dishes, and CDs. I don’t know how long I’ll be in this apartment, but I think it’s the right place for me to be right now.

Live Performances That Have Provided Outstanding Distraction Value Since The Turn of the Year 2011:

I did miss the trombone quartet doing an evening of Kiss songs, but it was the same night as Fleet Foxes, so that’ll have to do.

Also, Alice Cooper and Vince Gill did a brief set during intermission at a hockey game. Does that count? I’m counting it.

I also met Wynonna Judd down the street at the bar late in the Winter. We talked about how funky the bass line was in Rufus and Chaka Khan’s “Tell Me Something Good”, and also about a house in Franklin where she used to live before a buddy of mine lived there (and stored my canoe for me). She agreed that it was an effective place to freeze your butt off in the Winter.

I am writing this well into the move-in to my new place in East Nashville, where the locals have nearly finished digging our part of the city out from being completely covered with cicadas. The critters grow underground, and emerge as crawlies that shed their skins to become flying things –seemingly highly agile but mindless malfunctioning tiny helicopters with no flight plan but an audibly powerful drive to fly throughout all visible foliage and have one huge screaming brood-wide tree-top sex party. They’re not locusts, and it’s not a Biblical plague.

I have been around cicadas before; my papaw’s tree farm in rural North Central Louisiana was full of them, as were everybody else’s tree farms. As mentioned previously, they shed their skins (the video is paired with music from Enya, which just seems weird to me), and these harden to form little crunchy brown husks that can be used to decorate your shirt or hang on your earlobe. My memory of them includes trekking through the forest to see which cousin could first collect enough “locust shells” to full up a paper grocery bag. This was when we weren’t collecting Graveyard Grasshoppers (which is a completely different critter, so named due to the hundreds of them that migrated across my papaw’s property every day in part of the summer, seemingly originating from the graveyard on the adjacent church property (and captured by us because they were beloved by the bass in the ponds of the area)), riding 3-wheelers, or building forts out of fallen pine limbs and/or preparing for pine-cone battle.

But they have been everywhere here for the past seven or eight weeks, to the extent that you find yourself scanning sidewalks and doing the cicada dance to avoid stepping on them while batting the ones that are flying around you away. I have had several of them land on me, and had to remove a few of them from my car. Some people deal with being near a swarm of several hundred thousands of screaming flying one-inch bugs differently than others. I have found the whole thing somewhat amusing, but others are clearly freaked out by them. During a previous emergence when I lived in Huntsville, AL, a woman called 911 to get them to send the police to deal with the noise’ I found this out because they played the tape of it on the news and asked other citizens to not call 911 about the issue. This time around I have seen a number of hoodied youth pedestrians (very common where I live) get totally zipped up, pull their drawstrings tight, and either withdraw their arms totally from their sleeves or just run down the sidewalk waving their arms around, as if they bugs care about the flapping or not-flapping of human arms in any way. My car, though, is a testament to their presence. They are stuck all in my grill, and they are smeared across my windshield.

Somehow I have managed to keep the bugs out of both apartments while moving, but their hissing has been incessant during certain parts of the day for several weeks now. During its peak, I could actually hear it over the hum of the window-unit A/C that it seems I will have to run constantly in order to maintain normal body temperature in this old 2nd-floor apartment at this time of year. The noise they make is close to white noise (like the kind that little girl in Poltergeist used to watch after the local television station has concluded its broadcast day, played the National Anthem, and turned off the transmitter til tomorrow), droning and hypnotic, and they make it quite loudly. I haven’t kept up with the exact details on the dates of this emergence, but I can tell my sitting next to my window that we are nearly done with this brood. By this time of day last week, I couldn’t hear myself think at this window, and now I can hear the footsteps of the guy next-door as he walks through his grass.

The cute/creepy creatures made by JF Sebastian in Blade Runner greeted their creator with a cheerful “Home Again Home Again Jiggety Jig”, and that is what I used to tell my (ex-)dogs when I would return home from work for the day. “Home” has obviously taken on different meanings as I have gotten older, and is again this week at the forefront of my attention, as I am moving from what has been my shortest-lived independent living space into one of indeterminate duration that is approximately 8 blocks away. While I will miss aspects of this residence greatly, particularly the front porch from which I start and then heavily edit these vain blog posts, my economic situation simply cannot justify the expense of continuing to live here alone. A roommate would be a valid option to allow me to remain in this space, but at this stage of the game, I find myself unwilling to cede full control over the bathroom, stereo, TV, or peace and quiet, considering the excellent array of affordable living options available around Nashville.

I fell asleep exhausted on the sofa after a particularly dramatic day recently, then abruptly awoke and couldn’t readily get my bearings. This has happened so rarely that it has actually occurred to me that it’s never even happened on a camping trip or sleepover or a hotel situation, which would be when I would think it most expected. In this instance, my eyes were still closed, but I had the distinct feeling of not knowing where I was. If I were as inclined toward panic as I have been accused of by a select few who seem to know me less than all would imagine, that would have been an opportune time; however, I remember laughing out loud about what a weird thing the human mind is. As quickly as it came over me it was gone, and I realized I was likely waking from a quick dream. They say dreams are your brain’s way of sorting through the experiential mail, so to speak, deciding which memories to keep for further processing and which are of less significance. My shift in “home” over the past few years has given me a lot to think about during waking hours, I imagine it has my subconscious doing some heavy lifting as well.

The same day this happened, I read a horoscope advising me I’d benefit from opening the windows in as many ways as possible, which reminded me that my current place –while wonderful in many aspects– has lots of windows, but none of them open, having long ago been painted shut. Luckily, my new place has lots of windows, and all of the ones I’d open are willing to be opened. There are no screens, however; so in order to keep the squirrels, cicadas, starlings, and other critters out (it is an extremely wooded lot, with a very active squirrel nest within 15 feet of my door), the windows that are opened should be propped up with the framed screen inserts. [REMINDER: get more framed screen inserts so you can keep more windows open.] So this weekend I am moving to yet another place called Home, but I guess it is possible that the Rapture (and successive destruction of the planet) could change all of that. Either way, I have another new place to call Home for at least the next few months, and I’m going to keep the windows open while I move in.

I spent the Thanksgiving holidays with my lovely girlfriend’s lovely family in Seattle, and here are the bullet points:

Though air travel has quickly become my least favorite mode of travel, and I think people should boycott it entirely for a few years, the Tea Essay screening process and the airplane rides were uneventful. (I was prepared to not be subjected to the bakskattur ekksraise, but thankfully was not selected to be subjugated in that specific manner that day.) There were a few near-panic moments in which I thought I might start yelling if I couldn’t achieve slightly more range of motion with my arms and legs (and/or a lower cabin temperature), but that must surely be normal for non-sedated humans wedged shoulder-to-shoulder into a winged machine with rockets on it, maintained and operated by people who are part of one of the world’s most expensive charades. I did get to ride a train around in a circle across a stupidly-designed DFW, though. At the apex of our hurry, the train we were on went out of service for the evening, so we had to wait for its replacement, which got us to our connecting return flight’s gate with exactly three minutes to spare. And, as much as I bitch about the Tea Essay, they did help me find my belt that I accidentally left on the conveyor when trying to wrangle my luggage, shoes, computer (out of and separate from its bag, of course), carry-on bag, and 3-0z bottles of liquids.

Seattle must be one of the most walkable cities in the US. It appears that there are several places in the city with traditional neighborhood housing mixed in with lots of independent businesses at which you can obtain pretty much anything you could need or want within about 6-8 blocks.

You cannot swing a dead cat without hitting a Starbucks. This is a fact. If you go there, try it. And they all seem to always be packed with customers. And really close to each Starbucks is an (at least one) independent coffee shop that is bustling just as briskly.

Some French café down the street has the best breakfast I have eaten lately: line an oval dish with ham, crack 2 fresh eggs into it, cover it lightly with shredded Gruyere, and broil it til the yolks are slightly less than firm. It was good enough that we had to go back again so I could have it for breakfast on the last day. I suspect I will soon be spending some trial-and-error kitchen time in my pursuit of this ideal. Listening to The Walkmen is even better with café au lait. Since my return from Nashville, I am positive that the bulk of the time I have spent talking to people about the trip has been rambling on about that egg dish.

The "Donut" Sculpture Near the Awesome Indoor Botancal Garden

On the way to that cafe on the first day there, I spotted a record store, Zion’s Gate, specializing in reggae and metal. Immediately I decided that place probably had Bad Brains t-shirts, and I was not going to leave Seattle without one. Figuring the store would be open again before the 5-day stay was done, I made it a point to go by and call on three other occasions during the visit. Each attempt was an opportunity to suspect that 17WfY’s assertion made on that first morning was correct: the stoner-metal guys who likely run the shop woke up to snow and ice during Thanksgiving week, promptly said “fuck it”, and went back to sleep.

There are LOTS of different owl stickers on the backs of lots of speed-limit and bus-stop signs.

One of the Owl Stickers I Saw Everywhere

You gotta REALLY want to go up in the Space Needle to make the cost of entry worth it. It ends up that I prefer to spend my money on various forms of “peasant food” and café au lait (or café con leche, as the case may be).

Seattle is the only place I have ever eaten breakfast in a place that is a drag bar at night.

Elliot Bay Bookstore is my favorite so far. It’s next door to a shop specializing in metal and band t-shirts, but they don’t have Bad Brains shirts.

If I ever request for you to not let me order any more Cape Cods tonight, remind me that I said that EVERY time I order another one that evening, not just the first time I try it after telling you not to let me do it any more. Remind me that I told you to tell me it’s for my own good.

1% of the cost of all Public Works projects goes to the arts in such a manner as to enhance public enjoyment of public spaces.

Troll Under the Bridge

There is a huge off-road biking track that runs between the pilings under one the freeways; it’s a public project that makes good use of the space. (I do not aspire to that kind of biking, but it’s really neat that it’s there. Maybe a skateboard park will be next?) There is also a huge troll under a bridge elsewhere in the city, seemingly about to eat a(n actual) Volkswagen Beetle. There are very interesting stories of guerilla art troupes modifying and retooling (and even transplanting) existing public art so that it is even more suitable to the greater public of the region.

Seattle seems as if it is missing a pro hockey team, but they do have naked girls reading. (I saw the flier.)

Speaking of girls, girls in Seattle coffee shops read comic books. Normal, pretty girls. I said comic books, out in public –not only within plain view of their friends, but actually seated at the table with their other girl friends reading comic books. Doom Patrol, even.

That guy from Microsoft has LOTS of science-fiction memorabilia and LOTS of guitars. If you like either topic, the Science Fiction Museum and the Experience Music Project are both worth seeing. I still think it’s weird that their timeline of electric guitars doesn’t make any mention of Cheap Trick’s Rick Neilsen and his funky multi-neck electric guitars. I think my dream job would be to curate that museum; it needs to at least double in breadth in order to begin to fulfill its name’s promise.

Hippies make the best donuts. And the best coffee.

You can not get a Bad Brains shirt at Pike Place Market. But you can get almost any other band’s shirt there, as well as any sort of fresh fish or vegetable, fruit, every tin lunch box you ever saw in elementary or junior high. You may also purchase an EXTREMELY wide variety of imported glass objects of all sorts, including all sorts of devices made for smoking pot, though you apparently may not take photos of these items, not even the military-issue gas mask that’s been outfitted with a bong chamber and an electric starter. It looked like something William S. Burroughs would have imagined into Naked Lunch. (This is not an endorsement of illegal behavior, nor of Naked Lunch, which I hated.) As the girl behind the counter said as I raised my camera-phone toward it, “THE CARD RIGHT NEXT TO IT SAYS NO PHOTOS.” And, no, she has no idea where I can get a Bad Brains t-shirt, but I might want to try Hot Topic “if they’re some kind of obscure band.” I ponder the meaning of the word “obscure” while ranting to 17WfY about the no-photos thing. I disagree with a no-photos policy unless a flash will diminish the lifetime of the subject matter, as in certain museum situations, but that is probably another blog post entirely.

If you are at a(ny?) restaurant in Seattle, you will be warned that stuff on the menu might kill you in certain circumstances. It’s true. Anything might kill you. Some stray wind-borne particle may spark an allergic reaction that closes your windpipe while revving your heart up to 180bpm. An Acme safe might fall on you while you are walking down the sidewalk, too, or any other number of cartoonish events might lead to an extremely abrupt and untimely demise. I think it’s just as chilling as it is uplifting to be reminded that each and every meal you eat might be your last.

Pike Place Fish Market, Between Throws

Most of the shows I’d want to see if I lived in Seattle are at The Showbox.

Irene is not home. Whoever made all the signs saying that, which are all over the yard of a little corner house by the water, seems to sleep outside under a tarp because of the voices of the demons that live inside the house. I wanted to stop and take a picture of the one hundred or so hand-written posters adorning the yard, most of which contained rants about Christians and demons, but one of the posters said NO PHOTOGRAPHS. I should have figured that someone who sleeps outside to escape indoor demon voices probably is probably also opposed to soul theft via photography.

The elephants at the zoo have been trained to lift their feet in sequence and turn their bodies appropriately for trainers with spray-hoses and brushes. The young adult gorilla, caring less about hygiene, seems just as happy to crap in its hand, sniff it, and eat it. Which one is it that’s genetically closer to human, again?

There is at least one crow per person in Seattle.

Hot Topic in the mall downtown sells DRI shirts and Misfits and Rob Zombie and Pantera shirts, but not Bad Brains shirts. The girl I asked replied “Bad Brain? No we don’t have that. Is that a band?” I had never seen a Hot Topic store before, but once I saw one, I couldn’t think of anything except the South Park episode in which the store is a vortex of evil responsible for the increase in goth kids.

Visiting the Museum of History and Industry reinforced a lot of themes that were touched on in my most recent favorite books, Daniel Suarez’ Daemon and Freedom(tm). The people who struck and protested at the WTO gathering in 1999 were right, but way too late. The people who participated in the General Strike of 1919 probably had the best example of the right idea, too, but conceded to corporate growth what could have resulted in a wholly different model for regional sustainability. This, also, is a rant for some other post.

Every independent restaurant I visited in Seattle has a wider range of mushrooms available on the menu than any place I have seen in any other city. (I did not see Scotch Eggs on the menu anywhere while I was there, but I imagine I could have found them if I wanted to make a quest of it.)

Ate killer Thanksgiving dinner with lots of 17WfY’s relatives, and not one of them seemed crazy.

While I have noticed a growing number of friends who are concerned with eating gluten-free foods, I saw something unexpected at one of the veg places we ate: “duck”, “chicken”, and “turkey” were available in faux representations made entirely of gluten. I stuck with the organic giant mushrooms and organic spinach in organic garlic sauce. A seemingly Jamaican man with his dreadlocks stuffed up into a huge Rastafarian hat was dining a few tables over, and I wondered if he was one of the guys who ran Zion’s Gate. My assertion still holds that if I ever come back as a black male, I’m definitely going to have dreadlocks.

I am sitting on my front porch drinking coffee (a situation in which I frequently thank aloud the Saurage family for having brought Community Coffee to the world) in Nashville, TN, on this lovely November morning; it is birthday week for me. I am in long-sleeve jammies and wool socks and also in my robe (now it is just my fingers that are chilly), but I am trying to maximize the time I can spend on the porch before it gets too cold to comfortably sit out here. It feels like just yesterday that merely going outside was an affront to your very being, an assault on your skin and your nervous system. The kind of heat that makes you wonder if you are going to develop cancer on the 15-step trek from the house to the car, or dehydrate and pass out and maybe not even survive the hundred-yard dash from the car to the air-conditioned safety of Target. (Luckily, I was able to avoid a lot of this Summer’s heat by working in an air-conditioned office from dawn til dusk for 58 days in a row to help deal with (a) flood (of) paperwork on a gubmint contract.) The up-side of such a blisteringly hot Summer is that it enhances one’s appreciation of the cooler Fall, Winter, and Spring days.

I guess it was sometime around mid-October when I finally stopped remarking to 17WfY and my friend TJ and colleagues (and anyone within earshot, really) that it feels great to be able to exist outside again without feeling that my skin was going to actually burst into flame. This Summer’s was a searing heat, but not the continual pressure-steamer kind of heat that I grew up with in Baton Rouge, where not only is it oppressively hot, but there is also the extreme humidity that keeps sweat from evaporating and performs so well at making sure your socks and underwear and shirt and pants are continually damp. The differences in my descriptions are nuanced and may be lost on my friends who have come here from other climates, many of whom try and fail to convince me that Nashville is remarkably humid.

This part of TN typically experiences one of the most magnificent seasonal changes I have ever viewed, and it increases in spectacularity the further East you go. There wasn’t enough rain (nor a prolonged period of evening-time temperature shifts) late in the Summer this year to fully stock this Fall’s color palette; instead, much like the past few years, we have gotten a representative fraction of the possible array of colors, just enough to know that Fall hasn’t forgotten how to turn green into multiple shades of purple and red and orange and yellow on the way to brown. But many trees seem to have gone on strike against the heat and the minimal rains by just moving directly from green to brown to bare.

The shift into Fall, since sometime in 1994, also gets me excited about hockey season. Since my friends and colleagues all know me as someone who couldn’t care less about football and baseball, and are usually reminded of that when they try to get me to discuss the latest sports news, I have been asked repeatedly how a boy who grew up in Baton Rouge gained such an affinity for hockey. (People who ask that always seem to stress it as ice hockey, though.) I have now been asked that enough times that I find myself wondering about the answer to the same question.

Here’s what I know:

The first event I recall buying my own ticket for was an exhibition ice hockey game that was being held at the Baton Rouge Centroplex in late July 1985 as part of the National Sports Festival. (I also saw Aldo Nova there, and Van Halen, but that’s a different post for another day.) I had pretty much no interest in sports back then (too), but hockey was unheard of that far South in that day, so it piqued my interest that it was coming to BR. All I knew about hockey back then was that it was played on ice by guys with sticks who seemed just as likely to be hitting each other as the puck that you couldn’t see on TV, even on the rare occasion it was featured on the Wide Wide World of Sports. Also, it was late July, and I figured if the floor was made of enough ice for hockey to be played on, it HAD to be cool in there, likely the coolest place in town. I don’t remember trying desperately to get anyone to go with me, and I went to the game by myself. I remember breaking the ticket price down in my mind, amortizing the expected coolness of the experience over however long it took to play a hockey game. My memory of the game consists of these details: The “ice” seemed slippery, but even I could tell that this ice was less icy than was customary for ice hockey. A layer of water was visible on the ice, and it obviously hindered the movement of the players and of the puck. The players were totally soaked, every turn and every hit spraying water off the ice on player who was part of the action. The players seemed like they had to work their asses off just to get any speed up, and when they were gliding across the ice, their skates left rooster tails. Refs were continually stopping and re-starting the game as rules I had no understanding of were broken and enforced. There were no fights. I don’t remember the score, but I think it was a tie. (When I left there, I took myself to see Louisiana’s LeRoux, a band which I imagine I will be the only reader of this post to remember, play a gig somewhere in a hotel ballroom near the river.)

A dozen years later, I moved my family from Louisiana to Huntsville, Alabama. University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH), I was told before even unpacking our stuff, had a KILLER hockey team. As live music options were very limited, and as many of my closer colleagues were in the habit of going to the games, I started checking them out and ended up going frequently when the team played in town. I cannot recall the team name, but they were consistently champions of whatever league they were in at the time. It was here that I started to understand more about the rules of the game and the strategies that could be used by the different positions on the team.

A couple of years after moving to HSV, a semi-pro team was brought to the city: the Huntsville Channel Cats. I started splitting my hockey-watching time between the college and the semi-pro teams, and the difference was like contrasting ballet and boxing. The college team was much more about finesse in execution as a team, obviously setting up and finishing plays they had studied in practice; their motivation was about maintaining a a name as a team that worked together to win games. There were never any fights, and there were rarely penalties in the college games; penalties were usually quickly capitalized on by the opposing team and spelled defeat for whichever team was most oft-offending. The semi-pro team, however, was made of guys whose futures depended on making a name for themselves compared to other players on their team and in their league. There was lots of showboating, lots of penalties, and lots of fights. It soon became evident that the crowd coming to see the college team play was out to see the former, and the crowd coming out to see the semi-pros were out to see the latter. It was at this point that I first started to question what drew me to hockey games that didn’t draw me to other types of sporting events.

My parents attended their first and last hockey game with me and my family on New Years Eve. It was a Channel Cats game in Huntsville. It was not their cup of tea to begin with, and I suppose in hindsight I was (much) more persistent/insistent about them seeing a game than I should have been (much like the Thai food outing on another visit). As the game drew on, I could easily tell they were showing their watches their how-much-longer faces. Throughout the game, there was a guy in the crowd who was being more obnoxious than I can convey without video and audio accompaniment, standing up and making lots of noises and taunts whenever a particular player of the opposing team took was on the ice, and particularly when that player got the puck or got sent to the penalty box. One one of that player’s many trips to the penalty box that night, the obnoxious guy made such a racket that the player lost his cool, stood up and grabbed a sealed 1-liter bottle of water, and threw it over-handed at that guy in the stands –2 rows of seats down from the penalty box– like a pitcher throws a baseball. The bottle hit someone else, who didn’t see it coming, barely missing that person’s geezer-age old-timer. Our seats were just a few rows behind the penalty box that night. As I watched the bottle fly through the air, I noticed that I was heading toward the penalty box. When I got there, I kicked the glass at the back of the box and the player looked up. As I saw him look up, I watched myself pour my large cup of water on the guy as I heard myself say “HEY MAN, YOU CAN’T COME IN HERE AND DO THAT SHIT!” About half-way through my outburst was when the announcer said loudly over the PA: “SPECTATORS SHOULD PLEASE REFRAIN FROM THROWING OBJECTS INSIDE THE ARENA AND FROM INTERFERING WITH THE PLAYERS OR OFFICIALS. VIOLATORS WILL BE SUBJECT TO EJECTION AND POSSIBLE ARREST.” I turned around to go back to my seat to notice that my son had missed the entire thing, and that everybody else who was with me were all busy reading their programs face-down or rummaging face-down through purses, making it look overly as if they were just randomly sitting next to my seat. Before anybody could say anything, I was approached by uniformed securityfolk with badges and police batons who told me they had been instructed to remove me from the premises, and asked if I was going to give them any problems as they escorted me up the stadium stairs and into the concourse. I said no problems, and the head guy told them to let me go and walk out on my own. He followed me for a while til they were out of ear-shot, then he stopped me as I approached the doors and told me he watched the whole thing, thought my actions were highly inappropriate but well-deserved, and that his boss said I have to go. So I walked back to my Dad’s truck and listened to the rest of the game on AM radio while everybody who had been ready to leave had to stay til the end so as to seem unrelated to the guy with the cup of water. It was a quiet ride home, except for a few exhortations on how my hot head was going to get me into trouble.

I moved my family to Nashville before the start of the Predators’ 3rd season as an NHL team, and it has been interesting living in a hockey town. I have tried to attend as many games as I can justify to myself, which is becoming less and less easy to do. These days I usually try to attend about 10 games per season and to keep up watching other games on TV when I can. Know that I “know” hockey, I can “see” it from a well-done radio feed, so I will sometimes listen to an important game on the internet if TV is not an option. I have a small collection of Preds jerseys curated on the cheap through ebay (and the team wins most often when I wear the black one), and I am in my second year managing an online “fantasy hockey” team that I let consume too many of my coffee-drinking minutes throughout the day. 20 years ago, I never would have imagined that I would do nor talk about those things, and it still seems weird to me in an unexplainable way that I do. I’d miss it if it were gone; I’ve usually had enough without having to watch every single game of the post-season playoffs, but I eagerly await hockey season from the vantage point late Summer each year.

Hockey games in Nashville have been the scene where several of my friendships have been strengthened, where I have seen my son smiling and laughing and looking to give me and his friends a high-five, where (I later learned) someone I used to know says a sign delivered from God heralded the eventual end of our relationship, where I anguished quietly with hockey-therapy support from my friend TJ hoping for an evening’s distraction from the heaviness of divorce-related strife, where I fell in love with a mysterious girl made of concrete and spray paint, and where I have had the best first date ever. Hockey reinforces that it is the nuance in life that makes all the difference, and it has provided example after example on how quickly things can go from being steadfastly one way to heading in some other direction at the last possible moment.

So, in summary, I prefer my Fall to have lots of colors, but my Preds win more when I wear black. Go Preds!

The only sidewalk on the block is on the other side of the street, so I sometimes get to see passersby as a weird form of entertainment while drinking my coffee. A recent midmorning’s occasional silence was broken by a guy and a girl, both in the 375-pound range, walking down the street in matching blue sweatsuits, telegraphing their arrival through the guy’s verbal boisterousness.

“So, what were you gonna say?” said the guy, right to the side of the girl’s face.

“wah wah wah wah-wah” (which is how I write the little sounds they used when the teacher spoke on the Charlie Brown animated specials whose voice was always out of earshot of the viewer), said the girl, her gaze remaining straight forward, a bag of groceries under one arm.

“What were you gonna say?”

“wah wah-wah” said the girl, still in a volume that would be appropriate for their relative personal distance, but soft enough that nobody else would hear it.

“What were you going to SAY?!” said the guy, with his voice bellowing with that animalistic growling sound that humans can make when their uvula is flapping back and forth like they do when characters are yelling in cartoons.

“wah wah-wah” said the girl, after which the guy quickly grabbed her in what looked to be a choke-hold and yelled into her face, “JUST SAY IT!”

“SAY… IT.” They started walking again, she still seemingly in a choke-hold. “I can git you to say it.”

I ask myself is he really choking her? what color is her face?

“SAY IT!” he hissed into her face, while she was still walking with the bag of groceries under one arm as gracefully as one could with a 375-pound gorilla wrapped around one’s head.

I ask myself does she seem to be in pain? is he really hurting her or not?

Pushing his face right up against her face, walking a reasonably straight line with her seemingly still in a choke-hold this whole time, he whispered “SAY IT!” so loudly I could hear it plainly from 25 yards away.

Just then the little chihuahua that is often tied to a wrought-iron gate in that same yard came un-glued and started yapping. That’s when the guy dramatically flung his arm violently off her neck, as if with enough force to send her to her knees and skidding across the sidewalk, but actually in a manner that didn’t even cause her to waver or miss a step.

The guy turns to the chihuahua and yells, “THIS DOESN’T CONCERN YOU, TACO BELL DOG! AT ALL!” He made a feint toward the yapping dog, and then looked up to realize the dog’s owner had been watching the whole scene. Then he turned back toward the direction they were headed, and he hop-hop-hopped down the sidewalk next to the girl with the groceries, hopping out of my view as if he were a contestant in an invisible sack race.

Etymology: Middle English seintuarie, sanctuarie, from Anglo-French, from Late Latin sanctuarium, from Latin sanctus

Date: 14th century

1: a consecrated place: as a: the ancient Hebrew temple at Jerusalem or its holy of holies b (1): the most sacred part of a religious building (as the part of a Christian church in which the altar is placed) (2): the room in which general worship services are held (3): a place (as a church or a temple) for worship2 a (1): a place of refuge and protection (2): a refuge for wildlife where predators are controlled and hunting is illegal b: the immunity from law attached to a sanctuary

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2a(1):

I’ve spent the 5 previous weekends, and some part of each of the days and evenings in-between, moving into my new digs in East Nashville, after having lived in Franklin, TN, since 1999 (except for the past 10 months or so that I have lived with my buddy TJ right down the road from my new place). In addition to the loads of help from my folks and a few long-time friends and colleagues, I have gotten to this point with help from sources I’d never have considered just a couple of years ago (as well as a lack of help or even general acknowledgment from some folks I’d considered until then to be the most helpful). But as notable as the shift in my surroundings is the shift in context associated with some of the locations I’ve (in)habited over the years.

I spent a lot of time in 2009 and 2010 either physically or psychically away from my home –whether randomly driving in my car on the Natchez Trace or visiting some of the TN State Parks, at the coffee shop in East Nashville, at the movies or the symphony or the Tortoise or Bill Frisell concert by myself, or at my buddy TJ’s house–, and I finally moved into a room in TJ’s house in East Nashville just as the ’09-10 hockey season got revved up. I feel the time I spent living there was a kind of buffer, a reasonably positive transitional space that was really useful for me despite my bitching about the cats and the smoke (and the lack of control over the temperature, and the moths). However, the entire time I was there, I was looking for a place to be able to spread my wings and place my things, and becoming more and more comfortable with my more urban surroundings –and with a very special friend. I found this apartment in late July, and it’s older than any place I’ve lived since I was in college. It’s got its quirks already, –as does having a landlord, as does living in East Nashville–, but it’s been fun getting to know them and becoming more at home in my new home.

Many of the landmarks I associate with my past and present have undergone radical shifts in physical appearance, and some have been replaced altogether at the same location. For the previous 10 years, I have seen certain of these landmarks and people in the Nashville area on a reasonably frequent basis, but always as someone who traveled 40-something miles to get to them. Now that I live in East Nashville, I see or visit many of these on a much more frequent basis, and thus they have taken on new meaning for me. Likewise, certain elements of my favorite places that were easily accessible while living in Franklin have taken on new meaning, as well (but fewer than you might expect; it is the frequent sight of deer and kestrels and foxes I miss the most). The contrast in just the sense of neighborhood between living in each of these two places is enough for several pages of commentary, but suffice it to say I am now living in a place that, despite its many quirks compared to the relatively pasteurized environment I had for the previous X-teen years, feels more like home to me than I have felt in a long time.

I am writing this from the front porch of the apartment, my new sanctuary, on a morning whose 55-degree temperatures and Crayola-blue skies seem to serve as some sort of interstitial frame between the end of a very dynamic and bittersweet chapter in my life and the beginning of one that holds much promise.